Jordan Taylor from Houston, Texas, visited Madrid last month for a slightly unusual reason, to take part in a chamber music festival. He had a great time, I'm glad to say, was bowled over by Madrid, and was even lucky enough to catch the tremendous welcome the city gave the victorious Spain football team after the World Cup. He posted about it to a guitarists' forum we both visit, so enthusiastically that I was tickled, and I reproduce his post here with his kind permission. Read on for Jordan's account of his visit to Madrid:

The Parlament de Catalunya has voted to ban bullfighting throughout the region. The regional animal protection law is amended by the vote to prohibit "les curses de toros i els espectacles amb toros que incloguin la mort de l'animal i l'aplicació de les sorts de la pica, de les banderilles i de l'estoc, bullfights and shows with bulls which include the death of the animal and the use of the lance, banderillas and the sword." This careful wording deliberately excludes the correbous, the bull-runs held in rural towns and villages, because although bullfighting itself has been in decline in Catalonia for some time, the correbous are more popular than ever. The law comes into effect in January, 2012. Read more.

The stereotypical picture of Romantic Spain, with its bullfighters and flamenco, cigar-girls and bandidos, was largely the work of a small group of nineteenth-century travellers and writers including Richard Ford, Theophile Gautier, and Prosper Mérimée (the creator of Carmen). The most eccentric of them was George Borrow, who spent years in Spain as an agent for the Bible Society, a job which left him plenty of free time and gave him the excuse to visit places ordinary travellers would not venture. It is almost impossible to dislike Borrow, who is occasionally irritating in his prejudices, but is almost always good-humoured, a talented linguist (though his Spanish vocabulary is often no better than an approximation) and an eager conversationalist, with a natural sympathy for those on the edges of society (and a distaste for those in power). And sometimes he could be so insightful that although his Spanish experiences were nearly two hundred years ago, his accounts are almost as true today. Here he is cheerfully going on about Madrid, and anyone who has caught the Madrid bug will recognise his conclusion: that what is fascinating about the place is not the city itself, but its people.

The Museo Romántico, closed for renovation for the last nine years, will open to the public again on December 3rd. I remember it as one of the most charming of Madrid's lesser museums, though its new name - Museo Nacional del Romanticismo - is truly horrible.

The Spanish royalty-collection agency SGAE (pronounced "sky") does not tire of opening itself up to ridicule. Only days after the widespread amusement caused by it trying to charge a Barcelona hairdresser's a monthly fee for having the radio on comes the news that it is targeting the tuna, not the fish but the ensemble of student buskers who dress up in Elizabethan costumes to serenade their audience. "They'll be the death of the tunas. Our performances are not for profit," the President of the National Council of Tunas, Joseba "Canary" Molina, explained to the newspaper Público, "and the payment they are demanding means we lose a lot of money." The lyrics of the tuna standard Clavelitos have been adapted - the flowers are now given from the singers' heart to the "Sky" inspectors.